Walk Quickly Behind the Loud Teenage Crowd When You Exit the Skatepark.

 

One of my favorite things to experience is: Stuff That Is Not What I Know. I love (more particularly) to be able to observe, to enter, a world that is not my own and just Be There.  So last night Addison was at the skate park and, delightfully, there was a group of skater / biker / stoner / lover / haters that were there creatively riffing on all the ways that they could make "Fuck" a part of any sentence.  Really not just sentences, too.  Fragments.

VERY creative.

So I loved that.  And I loved hearing how one of them, who has, apparently been out of high school for a coupla' years, and is already in a dead-end job was talking about his life with the kind of boastful misery that was, I though, reserved for the forty-years-in-a-machine-shop guys.  I couldn't tell if he actually had a lot of credibility with the crowd or if he just talked a lot.  He did.  Talk a lot.

There was one woman.  She had no skateboard, no bike,  not even any shoes.  She was very loud and kept walking into the middle of the skatepark and yelling flirtatious insults at people until she gathered a group of admiring dudes around her.  Then she would move to another corner of the fenced in world and repeat-performance.  I knew her in high school.  You probably did too.

All around this though is this incredible kinesthetic poetry.  Bikers and skaters swooshing down the ramps, leaping and twisting into the air, veering narrowly around one another, twisting and turning their boards, their bikes, their bodies in ways you couldn't imagine if you were a CGI animator.

(Well, maybe you could, but the average CGI animator isn't as imaginative as you.)

The sun had started to slant its light across the pavement and the chain link and the big pool across the street still threw a gentle sound fabric of cheezy pop music, yelling kids and splashes.

I sat in the adjacent park next to an oak tree in the grass.  I was invisible because of the shade and because I am over forty.

And it was all very good.