On Halloween, trick-or-treating with the kids, we passed a pumpkin with a “6-7” design. I figured it was some inside joke for the people in the house, but my wife told me it was an inside joke for young people in general. Only confirming what has been a burgeoning thought for a while now, viz. I have no idea what the world’s youth are paying attention to. Yes, the collective adult world has been baffled by the fad of “6-7”, so I’m taking convenient example and, yes, it’s very old of me to use this example, but, like “6-7” itself, it’s just a device to get to something more meaningful.
Rather than use my complete lack of understanding for this phenomenon as a litmus for my increasing obsolescence I have held onto it and have seen it become an appreciation of the place I have worked to get to since I was twelve or so, a place most youth aspire to: total detachment from fads. I guess this is a place most adults find themselves either by design or by accident sooner or later.
The coincidence is that when you achieve the lofty, detachment that young people work hard to affect, you lose a good deal of your conversational fodder which is what allows one to connect to the world at large. I used to get together with my peers and discuss everything going on in the world, from singular things like “6-7” to politics with global consequences. Gradually, very gradually, I’ve stopped consuming the media which—I didn’t realize—was my primary source for this conversational material. Without the news, without TV, hell, I don’t even watch movies anymore, I’m left with a world that only seems to change in the physical. A new bridge is built; I can’t miss that. A building is torn down, and I see something change, but the everchanging effluvia of the world, I’ve managed to mostly tune out, and when I do have chance to talk with people without a directive driving the conversation—which isn’t often—I don’t have much to say.
However, back when I did have “something” to say, it was almost always a complaint anyway. Almost always just a rejection of whatever was being discussed and then a reiteration of my manifesto that provided the basis for this rejection: “it’s all just manufactured crap; there’s a great deal of pain and suffering in the world, and what are we doing about it by consuming this tv show, or thinking about this superfluous topic?” But at least when I talked about this, I could speak from authority, because I still knew what was going on in the world enough to reject it. Perhaps this is the requirement: you have to demonstrate understanding of the world you are complaining about, otherwise, you are just crochety, and give the impression that everything just upsets you.
But having kids changes the effect of the world; it makes it nearly overwhelming, even in its smallest aspects. I used to get bored. I used to feel sad. Since having kids, I’ve completely lost both of those responses to the world. I always feel a little overwhelmed by the stimulus coming at me, which I guess is why I’ve had to mute so much of it. And the profound emotional responses I used to get have either been suppressed or have dissipated for having become irrelevant in my day-to-day life. I no longer wonder what I’m going to do with a Sunday afternoon—I just hope I can squeeze a little gardening in between the trips to the kids’ section of the library, the playground and playing Candy Land. Usually, the only thing I manage to do is stand around in the garden and look at it. I no longer wander around at night and feel like a 19thcentury romantic poet because I’m asleep or trying to get to sleep by 9pm.
But this change in my relationship to the media of the world to the concrete has wrought some interesting changes, things that I think I lost after early adolescence when I stopped using my imagination as much and started consuming a lot of media. I’ve noticed the same change in my wife, too. While I don’t pay attention to the news, or modern music and celebrities, I’ve become more aware of my responsibilities in the place I occupy in the moment, ie. where I’m standing and who I’m standing there with and my responsibility.
…
On my way down to San Francisco to catch up with a friend, I stopped at the Ukiah skatepark which has a nice little bowl section. When a ramp is about three feet or so, I’m able to do things fakie as well, so I was having a lot of fun the more warmed up I got. I keep a pair of skate shoes in my car and they were rapidly falling apart the longer I skated. I was also wearing a pair of pretty tight jeans. I don’t like them that tight, but that’s how they came in the mail, and I wasn’t going to bother returning them. So, I probably looked strange to all the kids there, old and out-of-touch, scarecrow shoes and pants, but I was having fun and I had almost no time limitations.
A kid, probably about 12 or 13, joins me in the bowl section. Since it’s just the two of us, we’re taking turns and watching each other skate. He’s got a good fakie stall—I don’t know what it’s called—and his 180s are slapping down really nice each time. So I complement him.
“Dude, you’ve got those 180s down! The slap sounds great when you’re popping them every time! Like textbook!”
He thanks me and says how fun they are. I know, I like 180s, too. But damn if I can get them to pop like that every time. But I’m having fun doing fakie to 50-50 which is something on larger ramps I can never get back on the transition from.
We’re taking turns skating a while, but it’s a big park and so, to keep my momentum going, a few times when he’s skating, I skate away to another section. At some point I hear his mom—or whoever she is—say from her bench something about him not “breaking open his head” or something. I figure she’s just telling him to be careful, normal mom stuff. But then it sounds like she’s really kind of berating him. I don’t know, I’ve got my headphones on, and I don’t want to be nosey. So I’m barely hearing all of this go down.
She keeps yelling and eventually they leave the park and return to a customized school bus in the parking lot which looks like their home. It’s painted a flat gray and has a trailer with some crap on the back. I see a lot of school bus homes in Northern California, and none of them have been customized for aesthetics, but this one looks particularly drab, uninteresting and messy. Between songs on my headphones, while I continue skating, I can hear the mom yelling at the kid after they get back to the bus. I hear him mutter responses, but he never yells back, probably because each time I hear him respond, she yells even louder. When I pay attention to what she’s yelling, it’s obvious she’s a little crazy:
“If you were to fall and bust you mouth! and I had to take you to the dentist! and they prescribed you antibiotics!, I won’t be responsible! for the nuts who would attack the dentist for prescribing antibiotics!”
Or some kind of crazy shit like that. I’m listening to this go on and on, and I keep thinking about the kid landing those 180s so textbook and the smile on his face when I noticed and I start feeling mad. The yelling starts to feel like it’s aimed at me and I’m skating less and listening a lot more until I start thinking, “I can’t be a witness to this bullshit.”
I skate a bit more, but I’m trying to come up with a plan. I need to do something to communicate this kid’s worth to him. I need to tell him I see him. I see his potential that his crazy mom is paranoid, or bi-polar or something and doesn’t know what the hell she’s ranting about. As I keep skating, I can hardly focus because I’m thinking how important it is for me to tell this kid that he’s good. That he’s important, and capable of the same greatness as everyone else. All the while, I can hear her yelling. The bus isn’t leaving, just sitting in the parking lot. The worst thing is that there are other people at the park. Not just skating, but playing tennis, exercising, etc. Other people hearing this yelling, who are just ignoring it or figuring it’s none of their business. Do they know there’s a kid in there for god’s sake? Do they know it is a kid on the receiving end of this paranoid rant? Someone who’s got a life ahead of him, a long path through the world who is being influenced by this shit.
I go out to the car, just across the parking lot from the bus and change my shoes, slowly, trying to decide what to do. I don’t want to have a confrontation with this woman. I’m all sweaty and shirtless from skating, who knows what it might look like to the casual passerby, but I’ve got to do something. I finish changing, hop in the car and drive right up to the bus, roll my window down and start shouting to the kid.
“Hey kid,” I start, wishing I’d asked him his name earlier. “Hey kid, you’re a great skateboarder.” I think I started with this because his mom seemed to mainly be interested in yelling at him because he was skateboarding, or wanted to skateboard, but then I started in on the more general. “You’re going to be great some day. Keep skating; you’ll be great some day. Don’t let her get you down. This won’t last forever.” By now the yelling coming from the bus and risen to a frantic volume and pitch as it was directed at me. But I didn’t pay it any attention.
“Kid you’re going to do great things. This won’t last forever, you’ll be out on your own soon. Keep skating, you’re going to do great things.” I was babbling now, just yelling a message of positivity, hoping he could hear it over the screeching which was coming from the bus, but the rage I heard in her voice made me feel like I’d beaten here and her spell on the kid. It reminded me of a cartoon when the protagonist gets their confidence and shouts down the antagonist and the antagonist, realizing they’re beaten, can only scream in futility. It felt like that.
Back when I was more caught up in the world, when I paid more attention to the news, and trends in music and fashion, I would’ve been upset to hear this kid get yelled at, but I don’t know if I would’ve considered it my business to respond to it. Now, it’s like I don’t have an option. I’m there and I’m thinking of my own kids and I just react.
So, most of the time I don’t know what to talk about, and I don’t know what profound personal feelings I still have to delve into, but maybe without all this excess filter, I’m more inclined to just act. Which I prefer over knowing what’s being discussed in the news, in social media. The world is right here, happening around me and rather than holding it at a distance and inspecting its products and byproduct for meaning, I can stay out-of-touch and just tell the young people that they are important and that I believe in them. Hopefully, with more practice, my message will gradually become more coherent.
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